On the 15th of July, at ten o'clock in the morning, I was passing across the Place de la Concorde, when a roar like the sound of a great and distant sea broke on the summer air. It came from the direction of the Rue St. Honoré. People were running across the Place de la Concorde, and pouring from the Rue de Rivoli and from the bridges. The Champs Elysées behind me had become alive with people; cabmen were standing up on the driving-seats of their carriages, waving their hats and shouting; windows of houses were alive and white with fluttering handkerchiefs; and now, again and again, came the storm of sound, unlike anything I had ever heard before, unlike anything I will ever hear again; wave after wave, storm after storm, and through it all the drums of a marching regiment.
The Ninety-first Regiment of the Line were marching down the Rue St. Honoré, bayonets fixed, haversacks filled, drums beating, and colours fluttering. Paris was marching with them. And then through the storm came the cry uttered by a thousand throats: "À Berlin! À Berlin!"
"What is it?" I asked of a passer-by.
"War has been declared with Prussia!"
"With Prussia?"
"Bismarck——" I did not hear what else he had to say, deafened and dazed by the roar that now surrounded me.
"À Berlin! À Berlin!"
War had been declared with Prussia. Oh, fatality!
Bismarck! At the name the gardens of Lichtenberg unrolled before me. I saw them stretching to the edges of the pine forests. I heard the rattle of little Carl's drum as he marched before us, the sound that had echoed through the years, to be amplified and converted into this.
War! Red war! And then, curiously, as I stood gazing and listening to the storm that was gathering to wreck the last of my hope, I saw something which I had forgotten for years, and which now came before me as a vivid picture: a great hand with a seal ring on the little finger, holding and half caressing the tiny hand of a child. The hand of Bismarck holding the hand of Eloise, as I saw it that day long ago in the hall of Schloss Lichtenberg. The iron hand which was to crush the armies of France and fling Napoleon from his throne.